In photolithography, a design is transferred onto a surface by shining a light through a mask of the design onto a photosensitive material covering the surface. The light exposes the photo-sensitive material in the pattern of the mask. A chemical process etches away either the exposed material or the unexposed material, depending on the particular process that is being used. Another chemical process etches into the surface wherever the photosensitive material was removed. The result is the design itself, either imprinted into the surface where the surface has been etched away, or protruding slightly from the surface as a result of the surrounding material having been etched away.
Photolithography is used for a variety of purposes, such as manufacturing micro-mechanical devices and integrated circuits (ICs). For ICs, a silicon wafer goes through several iterations of imprinting a design on the wafer, growing a new layer over the previously imprinted design, and imprinting another design on the new layer. The different designs on each layer interact electrically to form circuit components, such as transistors, transmission paths, and input/output pads. Typical IC layers include a diffusion layer, an active layer, a metal layer, a polygon layer, and one or more contact layers to electrically connect features on neighboring layers.
Photolithography can make very small components. Hugh numbers of small circuit components can fit within a given surface area. Current photolithography techniques routinely fit millions of circuit components onto a single chip. Market pressures, however, continually drive for smaller components, higher density, and greater functionality.
As the smallest feature dimension (the critical dimension) in a design nears or drops below the wavelength of the light source used to project the design, the image no longer identically represents the shapes of the features in the design's mask. For instance, the ends of lines are cut off, sharp corners are rounded, and features become increasingly interdependent, causing features “bleed” into each other or not resolve at all. An area of study called resolution enhancing technology (RET) is constantly in development to compensate for these effects in near- or sub-wavelength photolithographic processes.
Examples of RETs include sub-resolution assist features (SRAFs) and phase shift masks (PSM). SRAFs, also called scattering bars or simply assist features, take advantage of the fact that densely packed edges actually resolve more sharply than isolated edges when dealing with near- and sub-wavelength feature dimensions. In which case, an SRAF is a feature that is added to a mask near an existing feature to improve the resolution of the existing feature as if the existing feature where in a densely packed area. SRAFs, however, are so narrow that they do not appear in the imaged design—hence the name “sub-resolution.”
PSM takes advantage of the interference characteristics of light. Light that is polarized in one direction (0° phase or phase I) does not interfere with light polarized in the perpendicular, or opposite, direction (180° phase or phase II). In which case, adjacent features can be assigned, or polarized, to opposite phases in a phase mask to reduce their interdependence. PSM is also a double-exposure technique. A second mask is used in a second exposure of the same surface to “trim” very detailed features. In some implementations, features assigned to different phases are separated into separate masks for the double exposure.
PSM phase assignment can provide excellent results in particularly troublesome areas. PSM, however, is not usually applied to large areas or entire design layers because, in the complex areas where PSM is usually needed, it is often very difficult to assign phases. For instance, features can be very complex polygons. They can loop back on themselves, or a number of them can be interwoven so that two polygons are adjacent in one area but are separated by one or more other polygons in another area. In either case, no matter what phase assignment is chosen, certain portions of polygons are likely to be adjacent to portions of polygons assigned to the same phase. In these complex situations, there usually is no clear, predictable approach to phase assignment, making PSM difficult, time consuming, and costly to apply.